I had better start by declaring an interest: Cosmas Desmond (hereinafter CD) is a friend from South African days, and it is in his flat that I write this review, of his book. Readers will be able to allow for any possible loss of objectivity; in another way the location is a positive advantage since CD’s flat is a centre of South African contacts and involvement. This is directly relevant to the work done in the book, since it is self-confessedly a committed work and a socialist work, not a piece of arm-chair theorizing but a thoughtful statement arising directly out of work in a traditional communalist (President Nyerere’s useful word, see p. 131) society, ruined as it is by White political and economic exploitation, work that is for a future African socialist state. It is refreshing to read a marxist argument in which “theoria” and “praxis” do not bespatter the pages till towards the very end, and this refreshment is directly related to the rootedness of the book: I remember a weary paper on “Theoria and Praxis” delivered by an Afrikaner philosophy teacher at Wits University, but the South African philosophical association is not the locus out of which any revolution, even a peaceful one, will come.

The thesis of the book is that the only Christian option in South Africa now is a socialist one. This is carefully argued both theologically-politically and politically-theologically (Part I and Part II); only theology has the right and duty to confess the emptiness of theology when faced with positive political option, only politics can argue positively for a particular political option — for one thing it has to be a realistic possibility, and theology can hardly calculate that.